How Google treats Inbound Links

Oct-10th-2008

Google have announced how they treat Inbound links towards the rankings and also towards the Google PageRank value given to sites. This was a very interesting announcement.

As we all know, Google uses the inbound links to your website as a rough guide to see the importance of your website. That is why people spend a lot of time link building. People have been thinking that the number of backlinks is what is important - What they announced says otherwise.

According to Google, they are starting to devalue links from websites not related to yours, even “ignore them”. This means that none-relevant links won’t have any effect on your Search Engine Results or PageRank. This makes it a lot more difficult to link build because you have to concentrate on links from your own niche or it won’t help.

As Google explained it:

“Let’s say I have a site, example.com, that offers users a variety of unique website templates and design tips. One of the strongest ranking factors is my site’s content. Additionally, perhaps my site is also linked from three sources — however, one inbound link is from a spammy site. As far as Google is concerned, we want only the two quality inbound links to contribute to the PageRank signal in our ranking.

Given the user’s query, over 200 signals (including the analysis of the site’s content and inbound links as mentioned above) are applied to return the most relevant results to the user.”

This would explain why a lot of users are having lower rankings after having an initial boast from the links before Google devalues them.

This is Google’s way of trying to stop link building. They only want links from the owners who are writing a review or an actual link instead of thousands of links from directories.

Some tips they did give to get valuble links were to create a blog, and post some interesting content - Such as latest news. This will make people link to you, but the problem is, what if they don’t? If you start a new blog, nobody knows about your site and you can’t get great Search Engine Results if they ignore directory links and the “non-valuble” links, which makes it even more difficult to get off the ground.

Google likes to make things more difficult for us.

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